I teach a self-defense class every summer, and one thing I now tell my students is to remember that a bathroom stall is a flimsy, confining box with only one exit and a door that usually opens inward to further restrict movement. I do this because the closest I’ve come to getting SA’d in the last 14 years was when I ignored my gut and walked past an ostensible “transwoman” who was standing at the sink washing his hands, and into a stall in a truck stop bathroom. When I opened the stall door after finishing my business, he was waiting outside with his little skirt pulled up and his erect penis in his hand. He said “suck it, cvnt, or I’ll cut you and make you scream.” Ordinarily, this would have been the point at which I pulled out my gun and arrested him, but I was traveling, so my main weapon was under my front seat still. I always carry a back-up, but I had it in an ankle holster, which is hard to get to in a bathroom stall. Fortunately, I’m taller than most men, and was in excellent shape at the time, so I shoved him backwards as hard as I could and got tf out of there. The bathroom was too confined for me to get the distance I needed to safely drawn my gun without his having time to get to me first; even in a shoulder holster, you need 26 feet of space between yourself and an assailant in order to be able to draw, aim, and fire; otherwise, they have time to close that distance and hurt you. I was out of my jurisdiction and my state, so I told the manager - but he basically shrugged me off, so I called local law enforcement instead. They came, but of course he had slipped away while I was talking to the manager. Apparently I wasn’t the first woman who’d had trouble in that bathroom - it was in an isolated part of a large truck stop that had multiple rooms and a lot of traffic. The cop I talked to said that they’d been pushing the owner to install security cameras in all areas and not just over the cash register, but that he kept procrastinating about it - surprise, surprise. He certainly wasn’t alarmed or upset that I’d almost been raped in his store.